Days of Heaven (1978)
Directed by Terrence Malick
In 1916, a Chicago steel worker accidentally kills his supervisor and flees to the Texas panhandle with his girlfriend and little sister to work harvesting wheat in the fields of a stoic farmer.
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41 films influenced by Days of Heaven
Films critics say Days of Heaven influenced
The film is a lyrical look at the lives of a group of children from Winston-Salem, a poverty-stricken North Carolina backwater and comes across as a sort of ‘Terrence Malick shoots Gummo’ – indeed, Green freely admits the influence of Malick, in particular the photography of Days of Heaven.
The most apt comparison I’ve seen is to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, a beautifully photographed, quiet portrait of a time and a place.
Though other 1970s influences are also apparent—the 1969 short “A Day With The Boys,” directed by character actor Clu Gulager, also included on the disc, is a key source for the film’s kids-at-play vibe—George Washington suggests what Malick’s Days Of Heaven would have been like if it just followed the girl and never left the city.
Many critics have compared the film's style to films like "Days of Heaven" by Terrence Malick.
Candace Evanofski's molasses-toned voiceover narration reminds us of the mournfully matter-of-fact cadences of Linda Manz's voiceover in Days of Heaven, a movie with which George Washington is often compared.
Nearly every review of George Washington so far has compared the film as a cross between Harmony Korine's Gummo (1997) and Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), both great films that use mood and style over story and character as George Washington does.
The film contains echoes of Malick’s debut feature, Badlands , starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek as two young people in love and on the run, and his dreamlike second film, Days of Heaven , starring Richard Gere and Brooke Adams as another set of young lovers trying to find a way out of trouble while working as farm laborers in the Texas panhandle.
These words are spoken by Eugene’s kid sister, Phoebe (Lola Kirke performs the older-wiser thoughts of child actor Darby Camp), with a kind of purity that recalls the dreamy voiceover of Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” — as mythic an influence on “Dreamland” as Arthur Penn’s “Bonnie and Clyde,” which could have been its prequel, had Clyde died and Bonnie stumbled away wounded from that climactic shootout.
At 27 years old, Miles Joris-Peyrafitte proves himself to be one of the most exciting young directors around with Dreamland, a drama with dazzling visuals, subtle performances and deft nods to classics like Days of Heaven and Bonnie and Clyde .
Beginning with fatalistic narration (from an unseen Lola Kirke) that immediately locates the film in a long tradition of neo-Western legends, “Dreamland” channels everything from “Days of Heaven” to “Slow West” as it lays the groundwork for a half-remembered folktale about a teenage boy and the outlaw who changed his life.
A sensitive, soberly rendered and ultimately flawed film about growing up in the parched plains of the Texas Panhandle, Dreamland is an uneasy mix of Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven and Badlands, with a pinch of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, starring the always probing, often underrated Margot Robbie as a bank-robbing vigilante.
Right from the start, it's obvious that screenwriter Nicolaas Zwart and director Miles Joris-Peyrafitte’s are positioning their film as a tribute to the early works of filmmaker Terrence Malick, especially “Days of Heaven,” which shares with it such elements as a Depression-era setting, lovers on the run following a crime (which Malick also utilized in “Badlands”), narration from the main character’s younger sister (voiced by Lola Kirke) and plenty of scenes clearly shot during the so-called “golden hour” to lend a sense a grandeur to the otherwise bleak surroundings.
We're variously reminded of Greed, Citizen Kane, Days of Heaven, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, and even Werner Herzog's oil-fire documentary, Lessons of Darkness — all better movies on similar themes.
The production design is by Jack Fisk, and "There Will Be Blood" often recalls Fisk's work with Terrence Malick on the equally meditative yet operatic "Days of Heaven."
Young Mary Sunday might have walked right out of Days of Heaven , and like that film, Blood ’s centerpiece sequence features a glorious, terrifying conflagration.
The time and place are superbly evoked in Grant Major’s production design, dominated by a cattle ranch homestead reminiscent of the Sam Shepard character’s in Days of Heaven , only darker and more oppressively Gothic with its heavy oak interiors, surrounded by grassy plains and backed by mountains.
On its face, the haunting Western concerns Phil and George, radically disparate brothers living on a ranch that aesthetically feels indebted to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven , and the ways Rose comes between them.
Reaching back to a Hollywood tradition built on films like “East of Eden,” and also to Terrence Malick’s rural art-house parable “Days of Heaven,” Campion, who wrote the script (based on Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel), centers the tale on two adult brothers who have spent enough of their lives intertwined to know just how different they are.
Ari Wegner’s work is immaculate, filming the country similar to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven , where the world can look gorgeous in a variety of lights, but within the text is the complexity of people.
One thing is certain, that The Power Of The Dog is the most gorgeous-looking Western set in the early 20th century since Days Of Heaven 43 years ago.
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Though one could glimpse The Searchers (1956) in its lunar landscapes, or Days of Heaven (1978) in its detached mood and often eerie beauty, the film's small, inward-looking narrative and headily large themes make it a piece of considerable originality.
Meek’s Cutoff is most definitely a niche programmer – sparse and understated dialogue, the barest of mood music and a bleached, dusty palette brings to mind such revered but commercially-barren westerns as Terence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978), Robert Benton’s Bad Company (1972) and Andrew Dominik’s The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007).
Notwithstanding exquisite images that evoke Terrence Malick's "Days of Heaven," city-slicker audiences may find themselves getting saddle sore.
Epic in scope, and featuring a powerful lead performance by Williams, Reichardt does justice to the myth of the wagon train settlers and makes a Western every bit as beautiful and poetic as Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven, and thankfully a bit more energetic.
He captures the vast wilderness in condensed form and has a "Days of Heaven" kind of appreciation for the golden hues of the landscape.
I don’t really buy that a tiny girl would talk like Hushpuppy, who narrates “Beasts of the Southern Wild” with a plainspoken lyricism that recalls “Days of Heaven,” but the movie is a fable, the narration is beautiful and Wallis makes it sing.
Comparisons to Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” and David Gordon Green’s “George Washington” are inevitable and appropriate, as Zeitlin emulates those movies’ sense of reverie and poetry and their ability to find aesthetic beauty in the natural, mundane world.
Reminds me of The Band - Music from the Big Pink - its on another level, there's magic realism, bits of Mallick's "Days of Heaven", post apocalyptic fantasy and everything what Spike Jonze's "Where the Wild Things are" should have been.
Benh Zeitlin‘s feature directorial debut feels like one that will be cherished by kids for decades to come, and lead Hushpuppy – played by six-year-old Quvenzhané Wallis – might be remembered as iconic a child protagonist as To Kill a Mockingbird ‘s Scout, Days of Heaven ‘s Linda, and Where the Wild Things Are ‘s Max (the three pictures it shares the most in common with).
You can, perhaps, already guess the film’s influences: movies such as George Washington , Days of Heaven and Ballast, yes, but also real-world events such as Katrina, the BP oil spill and even melting polar ice caps (we see glimpses of strange, prehistoric creatures arising from the softening ice and trampling their way toward the Bathtub).
Report: It’s difficult to explain exactly what Beasts Of The Southern Wild is, though it’s undoubtedly something extraordinary: like a live-action Miyazaki film, with Days Of Heaven narration, set in a dirt-poor community at an unspecified time of crisis.
In many ways, Train Dreams feels like a cinematic cousin to Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven or Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow.
If you’ve seen “Days of Heaven” (1978), then you’ve already watched a vastly superior version of this movie.
“Days of Heaven” comes to mind, although (and obviously so) “Train Dreams” does not reach the poetic beauty of such.
The idea, I suppose, was to replicate the great films of Terrance Malick. Most notably, “Days of Heaven”…
Anyone who has lost themselves in the likes of Days of Heaven, Into the Wild, and Wild will find a place in their heart for Train Dreams.
…it’s safe to assume that Bentley, his longtime co-writer and collaborator Greg Kwedar (Sing Sing), and cinematographer Aldolpho Veloso are fans of Terence Malick’s work, notably Days of Heaven.
Zhao’s flair for the open road recalls Dennis Hopper’s “Easy Rider” (1969), while her magic-hour skies rival Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978), offering Fern as a successor to Jack Nicholson in “Five Easy Pieces” (1970) and Harry Dean Stanton in “Paris, Texas” (1984), a masterpiece so profound that it’s hard to put into words.
Instead, Nomadland plays as a cerebral character study, although not too focused on the state of mind to shy away from the beautiful scenery existing all around Fern. Zhao, once again, settles into a cinematic atmosphere that calls to mind Days of Heaven and other dreamlike scenery out of a Malick film or something as pure from that time period.
Nomadland wanders the same American landscape as Badlands , Days of Heaven , To the Wonder , and Knight of Cups , asking similar questions about being-in-the-world, human meaning-making, and what Walker Percy calls “the search” in his novel, The Moviegoer .
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The new film wants to be as glorious to look at and listen to as Terrence Malick’s “Days of Heaven” (1978) and as wracked with emotions as James Gray’s “The Immigrant” (2013), and if it doesn’t match the achievements of those two, Cianfrance still proves his point.
That theme gets lost in the beautiful imagery, inspired by the look of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven (1978) and shot by Akin’s frequent cinematographer Rainer Klausmann on 35mm film with wide-angle lenses.